From Clinton, A Lackadaisical And Unfocused Effort

September 11, 1992|By David Broder, Washington Post Writers Group

JACKSONVILLE — Even before President Bush raised the ante with his speech Thursday to the Detroit Economic Club, a grain of doubt was beginning to form in my mind about front-running presidential challenger Bill Clinton.

The crowds on the first swing of his fall campaign were big and enthusiastic. Clinton was in good form, especially when ad-libbing a stump speech to a throng that had waited almost until midnight outside his Connecticut hotel, or rattling off concise, specific answers to 25 viewer questions at a statewide televised Florida town meeting here. A supple mind, a quick tongue and 12 months of non-stop campaigning have made Clinton a polished pro on the stump.

Still, the campaign that Bill Clinton unleashed in his post-Labor Day run for the White House was a popgun offensive, hardly the kind of assault that would usually cause an incumbent president to quake in his boots. Clinton has so many other things going his way that he may need to do no more than demonstrate his own competence. Big things - such as a weak-looking economy, a scared electorate and an accumulation of nicks and scrapes to Bush's reputation - are propelling this year's Democratic nominee forward.

There's nothing discreditable about winning on the other fellow's weakness; Bush himself came into the Oval Office that way. But, according to senior aides and to Clinton's own comments in a revealing Rolling Stone magazine interview, he will not be satisfied to back into the presidency. He wants a mandate for major policy change, the kind of win that Ronald Reagan got in 1980, one that would enable him to overcome the status quo forces in Washington.

Campaign strategists say Clinton is pushing them to expand the battlefield against Bush. He wants to put time and money into places like Florida where his long-range chances are marginal, rather than focus entirely on the states where he has the best chance to get the 270 electoral votes needed for victory.

But Clinton's hunger for a big win is hard to reconcile with the slow pace and soft content of these opening days of the fall campaign.

Clinton began his Labor Day weekend in South Carolina, one of the states he is least likely to carry, visiting with his pal, former Gov. Dick Riley, and riding the pace car at the Darlington 500 stock car race, where he was - like most visiting politicians - booed.

He then treated himself to a ''homecoming'' in Hot Springs, Ark., a nostalgia trip with high school classmates that again left him out of the news.

On Labor Day itself, he made a politically necessary pilgrimage to Harry Truman's hometown of Independence, Mo., where he sounded plausibly indignant about Bush's recent efforts to swipe the Truman persona. Clinton argued that Bush's policies have hurt the very working people Truman sought to help, but the Bush campaign short-circuited the Clinton message by having the president assert, that same morning, that Clinton lacks the decisiveness for which Truman was famous, and certainly can lay no claim to emulating Truman's valorous military record.

Clinton played into Bush's hands by getting into yet another angry exchange with reporters over inconsistencies in his accounts of the steps that kept him out of the army during the Vietnam War.

After the press contretemps and the rain-shortened speech, Clinton dawdled in Independence for more than two hours, then flew to heavily Republican Cincinnati for a labor picnic with running mate Albert Gore Jr. By the time he got to his final stop, in Connecticut, he had missed the planned 11 p.m. news shows. It was far from the high-energy campaign most Democrats schedule on a day that is traditionally a great showcase for their campaign themes.

On Tuesday, Clinton delivered a morning address on industrial policy that evoked no applause from his factory-worker audience and provided only modest substance for the next day's newspapers. The rest of the day he was out of sight, raising money and wooing big-business support, an odd follow-up to his temporary dip into Trumanesque populism on Labor Day.

Wednesday was a day of mixed messages, with narrowly targeted appeals to black and Jewish audiences sandwiched around a rehash of his welfare reform plan - a tie-in to the new campaign ad released that day - and then the Florida call-in show.

Thursday he was back in Little Rock, with nothing on his public schedule for the following four days but a speech at Notre Dame and a fund-raiser at Pamela Harriman's Virginia estate.

It's an oddly lackadaisical and unfocused effort for a challenger. But none of this may matter in the outcome. The voter interviewing that four of us from The Washington Post did just before Labor Day showed so much personal and political disaffection from Bush - mainly on the economy but also on such varied questions as the survival of Saddam Hussein and the spread of AIDS - that the incumbent's problems look all but insoluble.

Clinton doesn't want to win a negative victory, as Not-Bush. But with people feeling as they do, and Clinton campaigning as he is, that may be the most he can get - if he gets that.